


I'm Not Calling You a Ghost (Just Stop Haunting Me)

by glorious_clio



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-05-18 17:59:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5937727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_clio/pseuds/glorious_clio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leia doesn't sleep well, but Luke knows a few tricks that may help her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Leia Organa doesn’t sleep.

She occasionally crashes into unconsciousness, but she often wakes herself up again, sometimes screaming, but sometimes swallowing back dreams of meeting people she knew on Alderaan. People who were kind and good and smart.  Sometimes, in the dream, she is conscious of a horrible countdown over the heads, visable only to her, and she’ll turn to Han, or more likely to Luke, as if to cry for help. Instead she introduces them, as any polite dreaming princess would do.

She _hates_ it.

Instead, Leia haunts

  * whatever base she’s on
  * whatever ship she’s on
  * High Command
  * the lowliest mess halls
  * anywhere she won’t be alone with her thoughts



On their way to Tatooine to rescue Han, she can feel that she’s driving Chewie and Lando and Luke wild with her pacing at all hours, but Leia hates sleep so much, and to be on board a ship without its captain makes her jumpy, too.  

Luke, kindly, approaches her on the third night when she is once again about to break from exhaustion. She knows she needs to sleep, she needs to rest before she puts on the bounty hunter disguise and work the same ruse that Han, Luke, and Chewie once used to rescue her.  Lando will try first, but they don’t have much time.

“Leia,” he says gently, unlike the time he used the Force to call her back to save him. This time his voice is tinged with kindness.  It doesn’t feel like urgency, but it doesn’t feel like pity, either.

“I can’t,” she says.

“Leia, you’re like steel,” he says gently.  “Even on Tatooine, it doesn’t get hot enough to melt it. When you’re under pressure, you’re unbreakable. But at night when the temperature drops, even steel becomes brittle in the cold.”

“You’re calling me weak?” she demands of this Jedi Knight. She is too tired, wound too tight for this. She’s so jittery she’s itching for a fight.

“Never. But the cold can break anyone. You need to rest; it will be daylight again soon.”

“I can’t,” she says again.   _I can’t rest, I can never rest, because resting means dreams and being visited by the dead, and I **can’t** …_

Luke takes her hand and he feels so warm, this desert boy, and maybe he’s right.  He leads her to the cabin that she’s been using and settles her on the bottom bunk.  

“Let’s just meditate, then,” he says, setting beside her.  

At first she scoffs, watching him as he closes his eyes.  She doesn’t do anything for a moment, as if to show him that she doesn’t need this.  

_Yes you do._

“This had better not be a Jedi mind trick, Luke.”

He quirks a small smile, and she loves him and hates him.

“You don’t have to sleep, Leia, you don’t have to dream.  Just close your eyes and find something to focus on, something small.  You can count, if you like. I sometimes count my breaths. You can feel your own pulse. Or imagine waves rolling in and out on a beach. Whatever you want.”

She’s not very good at it.  

But she tries, and as Luke says, that’s the main thing. After a few hours, she can feel herself drifting and Luke says very quietly, “Would you like me to leave so you can try and rest now?”

Hesitantly, she says, “You may stay.” In her mind, she recalls a different memory of a stormtrooper taking off his helmet and saying “I’m here to rescue you.” She curls up on the bunk; Luke shifts and covers her, and true to his word, climbs up to the top bunk.  

She keeps trying to meditate, but slips off into sleep.  She wakes a few times, but Luke wakes too, and the same feeling of gentleness washes over her each time.  

She doesn’t get much better at meditating, at least, not to the same level at Luke (he reminds her not to compare them, he’s been doing this a bit longer, and anyway, his nightmares were nowhere near as terrible as hers). But she sleeps better, and though she still has nightmares, she doesn’t wake. Luke says that she fights them in her sleep, and sometimes is successful.  

But soon she’s following Threepio and R2’s footsteps to Jabba’s Palace, Chewbacca next to her, and Leia wonders when she’ll get to sleep again.


	2. Chapter 2

Leia is bone tired as she ascends the _Millennium Falcon’_ s ramp, grains of sand whipping cruelly into her skin. She is lucky to have a wrap around her, but she is still wearing a lot less clothing than she is accustomed to. R2 had removed the manacle from her neck, but the sand was finding its way into the welts it left behind.  She will have to be careful to clean it out, and Chewie needs attention, and Han should at least be scanned for any damage….

Han’s vision is starting to improve, but he is in no condition to fly; Lando and Chewie nearly tossed him out of the cockpit after their parting words to Luke.  

So they stand shivering in the corridor, bickering briefly over who is to use the shower first.  

In the end, Leia went first, so her hair will “have more of a chance to dry” although she knows that it will still be wet in the morning.  It seems more important to let Han win this battle, although the residue from the carbonite freezing cannot be any more pleasant than Hutt slime.

Leia feels ready for sleep. She has showered, eaten, has had as much water as she wants. She is meditating in the bunk that she has called home since… well.  For a long time. Even though Luke isn’t there physically, she can still feel him. She wonders idly if he is still sending her his… energy? Force? Jedi mind tricks?  But as much as she relaxes into her own skin (and her own clothes, nearly every inch of skin safely covered again, and warm despite the deep space cold that seeps into the _Falcon_ ), her calm body refuses to take the next step into slumber.  

She wonders if the _Falcon_ has any tea. She hadn’t thought to check for it before they departed, so she hopes as she slips into her boots and makes her way to the galley.

The light is on, and Leia is not at all surprised to discover Han at the table, cradling a hot drink of his own.  He looks haunted; Leia knows the feeling.

“Evening, Captain,” she says quietly. “Mind if I join you?”

“Make yourself at home. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No, I looked for sleep, but it hasn’t found me yet. So… tea.”

He inclines his head towards the cabinets and she bustles around, heating the water and pouring it over the leaves she finds.  When she turns around again, he is watching her. Han nudges a chair with his foot, but instead she settles right next to him on the bench and curls up into him as much as she can while balancing a hot mug.  

Hesitantly, he wraps an arm around her back and she sighs.

“Can’t sleep, either?” she whispers.  

“I’ve always liked to sleep in perfect darkness,” he starts, “but now…”

She hmmms in understanding, saving him from elaborating. She’s happy to spare him the trouble.

“Besides, six months of hibernation, I don’t know if I’ll ever want to sleep again.”

They sit in silence for a while, sipping warmth from battered mugs, relishing in the shared heat between them, Leia basking in the gentleness still radiating from the twin suns she’s come to recognize as Luke in her mind.  She feels tiredness sweeping gently over her.  She feels how Luke helped her with this step, and she wants to teach Han, suddenly.  

“Would it help you sleep,” Leia begins slowly, but gains courage as she knows this is the right direction, “if you had someone to sleep _with_?”

He jerks next to her and she smiles, not daring to look at his face.  She doesn’t mean sex, and besides, she’s never… but that’s not important. And while her proposition sounds like it could be taken that way, she has learned that the greatest intimacy is actually vulnerability, the kind that is given freely.

But he still hasn’t answered.  

“Han?”

“Who did you have in mind?”

Leia laughs now, and turns to him.  “While you were gone, Luke and I, we shared a cabin. He taught me some mediation, and maybe some Jedi tricks, I don’t know. A night in Jabba’s palace notwithstanding, it has definitely helped.”

“And tonight?” Han says.

The skepticism evident in his tone. If anything, that makes her feel like she’s on the right path.  

Leia shrugs and swallows the rest of her tea.  Instead of answering, she grabs Han’s mug and washes them quickly at the sink. While she rinses the soap out, she hears Han stand and gently he tugs at one of her two braids that are still damp on her back.  

“Okay,” he whispers.

She leaves the mugs to air dry and he leads her to his cabin.  

Years ago, Leia (mid-squabble with Han) discovered that Chewbacca slept in the captain’s official quarters. When Leia asked Han why he slept in the first mate’s cabin, he shrugged and said Chewie needed the space more than he did. It was the first thing about him that she truly liked.  The first of many.  

“I’m not meditating,” he says proudly when they reach his bed.  

He watches her glance around.

“Sorry about the mess,” he offers.

“No, it’s not that,” she says distractedly.  Instead of explaining, she goes over to the largest storage locker and opens it.  “Aha!” She flips on the light inside.  “Now it won’t be black as the pitch from pillar to post.”

“Come again?”

She turns and her smile fades a bit.  “Oh, it’s something my father used to say. It just means… black. Absence of light. I can’t remember where the expression came from, he must have told me….” She shakes off the memory and goes to the lightswitch. Before she does anything, though, she turns to Han to make sure it’s okay.

He shrugs and sits on his bunk.

It’s now or never, Leia thinks, and flicks it off.  

The light from the locker is softly illuminating the space, like candlelight in luminance, though steadier.  She makes her way to the bed.  

“Which side do you sleep on?” she asks.

“The middle.”

“Me too.”

“Well we fight about everything else, seems fitting that we fight over positions in the bedroom, too.”

Oh, she hates him and loves him.

“Get into bed, Han.”

“Ooh,” he laughs and waggles his eyebrows.  But he finally pulls off his boots, lays down, and scoots under the covers.  

After kicking off her own boots, she climbs in next to him.  Like before in the galley, she curls up next to him.  She has felt electricity between them before, has nearly acted on electricity between them before, but this is a different sort of heat than that.  It’s different from the gentleness that she gets from Luke. The heat that she can feel between Han and herself is so comfortable, so… inviting and _safe_. (Which is a radical word for a leader of the Rebel Alliance. Safety is not something she is used to anymore.)

Safe. Secure. She latches onto this feeling and tries to meditate on it, tries to be a conduit of this protective feeling so she can give it to Han.  

She’s not sure it’s working. She’s no Jedi, has had no training like Luke, but she’s always been willing and able to help others heal. Leia hopes it is enough.

She feels Han relax in her arms, and after a few more moments of

_safe safe safe  
_ _you’re safe Han  
_ _safe safe  
_ _I’m Leia Organa  
_ _I’m here to rescue you_

she feels him drift off, a feeling confirmed by a light snore.  

The snore feels like permission, and Leia finally fades into sleep herself.  

_Safe safe safe  
_ _we three will always rescue each other_

She falls to sleep, warmed by Han beside her, and by the twin suns Luke sends to guard her dreams.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this something like three months ago, before The Force Awakens. The truth is, I sometimes dream of people who have passed on, and I hate it, I absolutely do. Thankfully it doesn't happen very often, but about three months ago, it happened again and after having a weird day at work, I came home and wrote chapter one of this. I almost took it down a few times, but people on tumblr really responded to it. I ended up writing a second chapter. 
> 
> I dunno. I hope this helps. It helped me. I had trouble sleeping the following nights, but I'm back to my status quo, dreamwise. Sorry, Leia, I know you didn't need to take on any more pain.


End file.
